Why Are Mass Shootings Happening in U.S. Schools?

Marjorie Stone and Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. This was the tenth mass school shooting in the United States in the past five years. A mass shooting is generally defined as one where at least four people are killed in a single incident, and once again Americans are left asking ourselves why. Lost in the noisy debate over gun control and mental health screening is another confounding question, why schools.

Why does so many troubled young men choose schools as the place to act out their violent and vengeful fantasies, And what, if anything, could schools do to avoid becoming the next Columbine Sandy Hook or Stoneman Douglas. We spoke with Brian Warnick, a professor of educational ethics and Policy at the Ohio State University, who co authored a paper

on the meaning and motivations behind targeted school shootings. Even though many associate gun violence in America with poor inner city communities, mass school shootings almost always occur in upper middle class suburban schools. That's where the status tournament takes place, explains Warnick. He said, suburban schools do a lot of things to select winners and losers in ways that go beyond academics. Think the adelation of athletics and the crowning

of homecoming kings and queens. He continued, the way we see it, when schools set themselves up as judges in the social status tournament, the resentment will sometimes be directed against these school itself. He notes that in the book Hollywood Goes to the Movies, sociologist and author Robert Bollman says that while Hollywood films set in urban schools focus on heroic teachers and academic achievement, films set in suburban settings focus on student journeys of self discovery in the

same vain. Many suburban school shooters see what they are doing is acts of self expression, Warnick said, there's a different value system at play in suburban schools. It's called expressive individualism. What we see in movies and TV is students engaged in this process of self discovery, breaking through

norms of the school, breaking through social cliques. Self discovery and individual expression aren't necessarily bad things, says Warnick, But for certain troubled young men who harbored deep resentment of the system that rejected them, there's no better way to express their true, tortured selves than through a dramatic act of violence. And the higher the body count, the more

powerful the message will be. We also spoke with Cheryl Johnson, a professor of criminal justice at Cincinnati's Xavier University, where she has studied whether increased security measures, namely armed guards on campus, locked down buildings, and metal detectors, are an effective means of preventing school shootings. She found that although beefed up security made to terr overall crime and violent crime in schools, there's little evidence to show that those

measures alone can thwart a mass shooting. First, school shootings are just too statistically rare to gauge the efficacy of different security methods, and second, there's anecdotal evidence that even

the best security methods can fail. There were armed school guards a Columbine, the Sandy Hook shooters shot through glass panes to bypass locked doors, and in two thousand five, a student in Red Lake, Minnesota, passed through his school's metal detector before killing an unarmed guard who tried to stop him, along with seven other people, including himself. There's also concern that militarizing schools with armed guards and security checkpoints contributes to the idea that the school is an

unsafe place where violence is almost expected. Johnson's seventeen paper, obviously written before the February Parkland incident, pointed out that the raw number of homicides at u S schools each year since Columbine in had actually decreased or remained stable over the years. One of the best ways to prevent school shootings, both Johnson and Warnick agree, is to encourage people to beak up when they suspect that a classmate, friend,

or family member is contemplating something terrible. A day before the Parkland shooting, a grandmother in Washington State called nine one one when she found her eighteen year old grandson's handwritten plans for a gruesome school attack involving homemade explosives. Johnson said, that's a school shooting we're not talking about today, citing a report from the Secret Service and the Department of Education that of school shootings, at least one other

person knew about the plans. In fifty two or more people had information about the attacks before they occurred. Warnick said, usually when school shootings are prevented, it's when students trust the teachers enough to share that information with them. If we could really build up schools as places of trust where children feel like they have adults who care about them, that would facilitate the communication that's been proven to prevent

school shootings. Of course, speaking up hasn't always been foolproof. We now know that the FBI received a tip about the Parkland shooter dating back to September seventeen for making this sturbing comments on YouTube, but he was never detained

or even questioned. A second person contacted the FBI on January to report their concerns and to warn them about the shooters guns and desire to kill, but the FBI has admitted that the proper protocols to follow up were left on followed instead of school districts spending money on expensive and unproven security solutions. Brian Warnick suggests they hire more teachers and counselors to shrink class sizes and encourage

more meaningful interactions between staff and struggling students. He'd also like to see more creative outlets like art, literature, and music classes, which often get cut from tight budgets for safe individual expression. Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse and produced by Tyler Klang. For more on this and other current topics, visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com